Online Piracy is An Example of the Future
One of the reasons that bills like SOPA and PIPA are getting so much protest is because everybody in the technology world, as well as every human being with a little bit of foresight, understands something that apparently our politicians don’t:
Content piracy cannot be stopped.
Any time I would talk about ridiculous concepts like “copy protection” to people, such as extremely primitive mechanisms on DVDs for example, I would just tell them, “If it can be played, it can be copied.”
Take for example our good friend Netflix. Combine that with a DirectX scraping application like FRAPS and you can simply record the Netflix stream while you watch it. So even though Netflix doesn’t offer direct download links for the movies (instead forcing you to stream them), anyone who is mildly tech savvy can download it themselves by recording it as they watch it.
Technically, doing so probably violates the Netflix terms of use, thereby making me in some kind of breach of contract and therefore liable to someone for some money somewhere.
Point being that the law that tells me not to do it is already on the books, but it’s basically impossible to enforce. SOPA would be impossible to enforce, too.
Or, it would cost more money to enforce than the entertainment industry would possibly lose.
But, enough of that. Back to the subject matter at hand.
The reason online piracy is a glimpse of the future is because it introduces a new concept that has never existed before in the history of humankind.
The MPAA and the RIA and any other entity that owns this mystical thing called a copyright will tell you that a DVD or a CD with their content on it has some value. In fact, they’ll even tell you exactly what that value is on the court papers when they sue you for owning it without paying for it. A movie or an album they claim has value the same way a loaf of bread has value or that a cup of Starbucks has value or an amusement park ticket has value.
The problem with content like movies and music is that it violates the basic principle of worth. Something only has worth if it cost something to produce. And by something, we mean materials combined with human effort. And really, since materials are extricated from the planet Earth, refined, synthesized, and produced through the labors of human beings, we can really get away comfortably with saying that something only has worth if it cost human time to produce.
Somebody had to spend a portion of their short lives to grow that wheat, to mill that flour, to bake it into a loaf of bread, to drive it from the factory to the supermarket, to put it on a shelf, to ring it up for you at the register. Human effort is involved in every part of the process. Thanks to the assistance of machines in these processes, the amount of effort per loaf of bread is relatively small.
Obviously, movies and music have big human cost associated with them. Ever count the number of names in the credits for a recent Hollywood Blockbuster, not to mention all of the innumerable consumption used in the production of the film. Somebody had to put together that catered lunch for the cast and crew every day on set. It would be ludicrous to deny the worth of a Hollywood film. In fact we have a pretty good grip on what they cost. Studios are not shy about publicizing the budgets of their films, which are nowadays often in the hundreds of millions. After all, if a movie cost $100m to make, it’s gotta be a high quality one, right?
The big difference between movies and loaves of bread is at the same time painfully obvious and easy to miss. The cost for producing a million loaves of bread is significantly higher than producing a single loaf of bread, but the cost for producing a single copy of the movie is exactly the same as producing a million copies. Well, okay, you need to put the movie somewhere (on bytes on a drive, for example) and those drives to have costs, but you get the idea – it’s a neglible increase, perhaps one penny per copy.
An easy corrolary to understand would be to imagine that we could bake one single loaf of bread and then duplicate it as many times as we want for effectively zero cost. If the economics of movies applied to bread, nobody would ever starve on the planet Earth.
Such a technology would surely be considered a great miracle, but it would piss off (and unemploy) a whole lot of people – basically everybody in the bread business. They’d have to go get another job, God forbid. Chances are the wheat farmers, the flour millers, the bread bakers, the bread-truck drivers and the stockboys would fight this hypothetical bread-cloning technology for their own sakes despite the fact that it would be incredibly valuable to humankind.
Do you think they would be successful in their bid to prevent people from duplicating bread, particularly if the bread-duplicating process didn’t require any special equipment other than the standard appliances that people already had in their homes and that all it took was a little bit of know-how? Of course not. The government could make it illegal to duplicate loaves of bread until they’re red in the face but people would still do it. Would the government really start rounding up the people that did? All they need to do is say to a jury, “but I was hungry.” Case dismissed.
You may argue that such a defense would fall on deaf ears to the jury if the prosecution could demonstrate that the defendant had the monetary means to buy an actual legitimate loaf of bread, but that argument is patently ridiculous isn’t it? You can get something for free but if you can afford it you must instead buy it. Really?
We as humans, whether we are consciously aware of it or not, place much higher value on things that we believe required more human labor. For example, when asked, virtually everyone will tell you that a coffee table made by hand without power tools is worth significantly more than a coffee table tacked together from pre-fabricated machined parts somewhere in China, even if the end result is virtually indistinguishable. We are fundamentally aware that human effort must be rewarded with money commensurate with the time and effort spent.
It’s very easy to think about an electronic copy of a movie that you download from the internet as not worth any money because it cost nothing to produce your copy. In turn, you could produce 10 copies, one for each of your friends, at zero cost or effort to you. Therefore it has no value.
The MPAA takes a different stance: every copy is worth the $100m that it cost the studio to create it in the first place, and that they are doing you a huge service by selling you a copy for the low low price of $19.95 on Blu-ray DVD combo pack.
Those in favor of bills like SOPA can make a pretty compelling argument. If online “piracy” (e.g., copying) of content like movies that cost millions upon millions to produce is left unchecked, then sooner or later nobody will ever buy movies. They’ll just download them for free instead. If not enough people actually transfer wealth to the producers of these movies they won’t be able to afford to make them anymore. Since we all like being entertained and we’d sure like movies to keep being made, that’s considered a horrifying outcome by most people.
The thought doesn’t cross anyone’s mind that if movies can’t recover $100m in expenses because of piracy, perhaps the cost of producing a movie should be decreased. Hollywood films are not a small undertaking by any means, but $100m (and up!) is a lot of money. Rather than simply accept that online piracy is going to cut a certain portion of their potential revenue, they want to stop online piracy.
We’ve already established that online piracy is unstoppable, though. Online piracy is this generation’s war on drugs. Making weed illegal hasn’t eliminated weed. It just makes criminals out of otherwise good people and overcrowds our prisons and costs our government billions of dollars.
So where does the future come in to this discussion?
Well, simple. It won’t be long before large segments of our economy are in the same situation that movies are in today. My hypothetical bread duplication machine is not some super high-tech sci-fi fantasy. It’s on the way!
Our entire economic system is predicated on the simple idea that time is equal to money – in other words, worth is derived from human effort which must be rewarded with some other variety of worth. The farmer trades his farm labor for the tailor’s habberdashery who trades his habberdashery for the carpenter’s construction efforts and so on. We abstract all of this into money and from this we’ve built an economic system that has remained more or less unchanged since the dawn of time.
Movies and music don’t fit into this system because an infinite number of copies can be created with zero human effort and zero human time.
One day in the not-too-distant future, an effectively infinite number of loaves of bread will be created with zero human effort and zero human time, because we will have automated the entire process from the farm to the stocking of the supermarket shelves with robotics and computers. This will mean that bread has essentially zero value because it has essentially zero cost.
When this transition first begins, many people will become very wealthy without doing much of any actual work because they will own large tracts of land. They will then invest in robotics to farm it, robotics to mill it, robotics to bake it, and robotics to distribute it. They will argue that they still have a right to charge money for bread to recover their investment in the technology that made it possible (and a handy profit margin built in). Meanwhile all the actual human beings who were involved in these types of jobs will be permanently unemployed until they change careers. For many that will not be an option.
We’ll enter a period where our entire economy is controlled by “robo-barons” – men, women, and corporations who have managed to use robotics to automate huge areas of the economy that are currently occupied by humans. They will drastically reduce operating costs by firing all the humans and at the same time they’ll still charge the same amount for a good or service that it used to cost, even when dozens or hundreds or thousands of human beings were spending 40 hours a week of their lives to produce it. Meanwhile all of those humans are unemployed, their jobs taken by robots.
If this sounds shitty to you it’s because it is. Fortunately it won’t and can’t last for very long. Perhaps 20 to 50 years at most – possibly even less. Why? Because we will be entering a radical new economic reality where time does not equal money, where worth is not derived from human effort. Entire supply chains will be robot driven.
Think about the costs of building a house, for example. The average cost to build a 3,000 sq.ft home in the US is about $220,000 – including all materials and labor and a profit margin for the contractor. If we imagine a world where the labor portion is replaced by partially or fully autonomous carpenter bots who can build a home according to computerized blueprints, we cut that cost almost in half because the labor cost is reduced to essentially zero. Obviously robots have an upfront and an upkeep cost so they aren’t fully free, but where you would need to pay a skilled craftsman at least $20 an hour, the upkeep cost of a typical carpenter robot will be only a tiny fraction of that, perhaps $1 an hour or less.
But why should the materials cost anything? In a world where we have robots that can assemble a house from blueprints, are we really going to send tough, rugged lumberjacks into the forests to fell our trees? Are we really going to have human beings feeding timber into a saw mill? The entire lumber supply chain can very easily be roboticized, and it won’t be long before every materials industry related to home construction is entirely automated, from earth materials extraction to synthesis to production to shipping to shelving.
Such a world is analagous to the world of movies and music today. The upfront cost associated with building the robots that can perform the labor of baking a loaf of bread will be in the billions. But once the robots exist, once that tech is there, the cost of replicationg that bread thousands to millions of times is zero. One day, every commodity will be like music and movies today.
In such an economy, who gets to keep the money? The guy who owns the robots? The overseer who sets them to task? The company who made the robots? If any of those is the answer then we’ll have a very strange world indeed. We won’t be talking about the 1% vs. the 99%, we’ll be talking about the 0.0001% and the 99.999% because for the vast majority of humans, the jobs we could do are done by robots and we’re simply, purely, plainly too stupid to do any of the remaining jobs, which will involve things like designing more robots. We’d see 50, 60, maybe even 70% chronic unemployment.
And why shouldn’t we? If someone doesn’t need to work to bake me a loaf of bread why shouldn’t I get it for free?
You may have heard the expression that it’s unfair for government to tax us and redistribute wealth because they’re effectively “robbing Peter so they can pay Paul.”
What if Peter is a robot?
One day – possibly in our lifetimes – working will be an entirely optional endeavor reserved for people who want to be able to afford luxuries. The majority of the human population will not need to work in the sense that we understand work today. We will not be trading our own labor for others’ labor so that we can eat and sleep with a roof under our heads. Our robot slaves will take care of all of that for us.
So, back to SOPA – pay attention to the total blunderous handling of movie and music “pirating” legislation today. If it seems ridiculous and inept, it’s because it is. But this is just foreshadowing, folks. The transition away from a worth-based economy is going to be wrought with monumental, incredible blunders. The problem is that governments are run by old people who spend more time looking behind them and preserving the institutions that they know instead of looking to invent new ones – yes, even your precious so-called progressives. How old is Nancy Pelosi? Is she 70 yet?
Transitioning from a worth-based capitalist society where everything must have value into one where nothing really has value is going to be very tricky indeed. We’re going to see a lot foolishness in the coming years as the politicians are completely unable to stop the changes that technology imposes on us, despite their best efforts to try. SOPA is just the first in what is going to be a long line of misguided bills that do attempt to control technological advances by forcing them to conform to existing, obsolete constructions instead of letting the technology dictate the law.
Lawmakers need to find a way to keep Hollywood in business while at the same time acknowledging that digital copies produced by the millions have no intrinsic value because they require no human effort to mass produce. We haven’t seen a good solution because this is actually a very, very hard problem. Because I’m a Republican, my answer is this: lawmakers don’t need to keep Hollywood in business. Hollywood has to keep Hollywood in business. The answer is not to turn off half of the internet or throw anyone who downloads a copy of their moves in jail or fine them into oblivion.
It’s a shame nobody smart works in Hollywoord or they’d probably have solved this a long time. They don’t have brains. Instead what they have is lawyers, and that’s how SOPA was born.
Happy Thursday.
